After that, she entirely forgot what she’d wished once to find amongst men. She came back with winter, her annual ritual, and stormed around in search of bigger, better — what? No longer was she shy. She smothered fires, buried farmers under her coats of snow. The people called her cruel — no more dumb fool simple soul — and wondered how she’d come to resemble them.

Winter that year stretched into April, May, June, July. By August they were burning the days of their calendars for warmth. The king ordained that whoever brought about her fall would never work again. But the men who’d once fought so hard to woo her now just begged her to be gone. Horns and flutes abandoned, their voices became one: Curse Ardour! Go away! Leave! Scram!

September, October, November. Winter led into winter. The king’s hunters laid traps to catch her. They shot to kill, sunk their munitions into snow. December, January, February, March. Months lost their meanings, years their numbering. Words were moot. Time was marked only by the aching advance of starvation. Folk looked forward to dying.

At last the king had only his son to send from his castle for firewood to warm his gruel. The boy had been quite young when that interminable winter began, and had heard of Ardour only as a monster, insatiable in her appetite for human life. He knew well to fear her, a beast as immense as his country, her body encompassing mountains and valleys, a woman said to freeze men with her breath. His father didn’t have to tell him to take care.

He wore boots of cowhide lined in fur, laced up to his thighs, triple-tied. His hat and gloves had been crafted from the same, fit to him so tight that there wasn’t even the space for a shiver. The coat, though, was a nobler matter: It had been willed to the king by his father, to whom it had been given by his father’s father — a tradition, in short, that went back to a generation before there was gold to leaf the family tree. What the coat was made of, though, people no longer knew: the skin of an extinct animal — a dragon, perhaps — or even the earth’s own crust? That day, the king laid it on his son.